The only way humans "explore" is when they are refugees or invaders. The US went to the moon to show a big totem to the Soviets: We Are Strong! Don't Invade! Exploring is evolutionary dangerous, so it is only done out of greed or necessity.
Best way to get the most high quality info is to tell everybody they have no clue and tell your theories with absolute conviction. Sit back and wait for quality responses. Then tell everyone they are wrong and tell them why. Humans love to prove others wrong and do their best work to spite you.
Why has no one told the medical researchers they can´t cure cancer yet? I can´t believe how much time iv wasted running marathons, wearing ribbons and making donations. I could have just wrote the doctors a mocking letter.
Hmmm, as a physicist a lot of this seems quite impossible to build. one kg of antimatter... we cant't even create a few micrograms, et alone keep it contained in a space capsule
@@SwissPGO the fact we can produce it is important. The rest seems to be a matter of having lots of energy available (and the ability to keep it flowing) for the capture/containment step. the ability to store it will be a game changer.
I was supposed to be falling asleep to the sweet sounds of science, and when this talk got going I bolted wide awake and my imagination just went wild. What a gorgeous idea!! This is the most exciting thing I’ve heard since I first learned about the solar gravitational lens about a year ago. I cannot wait to see where this goes!!
Glad I'm not the only one that plays science videos to fall asleep to, LOL! I have a few playlists of things like year one university-level geology lectures and such, with people with a pleasant voice that are nice to nod off to! I strongly suggest you find Journey To the Microcosmos, which is a fantastic channel with Hank Green using his soft voice; especially around 1-2 years ago his voice was top-calm - I LOVE falling asleep to that voice! (Edited to correct the channel name)
@@MaryAnnNytowlI do the same. I love when I’m in the right sleep stage and the volume is just right and I literally begin to dream what’s being said on the video.
I remember as a kid, I used to think stars were just little specs of light that you could touch in outer-space lol I remember the day in school that I found out that those specs were actually distant sun’s just like our sun but super far away & you could never touch them! I was mind blown 🤯 Even today when I explain to other people that don’t know about space that those specs of light you see in the sky are actually distant sun’s just like our sun! it’s always fun to see them be mind blown just as I was all those years ago ☀️💫🚀🌎
Andrew Higgins seems a really down-to-earth guy for wanting to go interstellar. Good to see that someone like Andrew Higgins is running the Interstellar Symposium.
@@xeniyal7454 well, one can also tweak the passage of time, it's as simple as adding mass. then, once you pass through the Kerr's blackhole singularity you can probably be anywhere.
@@milanstevic8424 still not good enough. If we achieve biological immortality soon, me and you have pretty good chances to step on Proxima Centaurus B. Without it, we die before even probe achieve it.
@@ModestestRUST buddy, Kerr's blackhole singularity is a scientific name and stuff, it's not a belief system. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity#:~:text=While%20in%20a%20non%2Drotating,as%20a%20%22ring%20singularity%22. Share the news anyway, but keep in mind that no one has yet proved singularities to not exist, it's completely untestable at this point.
Hilarious that you mention it when the practical engineering is entirely glossed over and taken as a given both by the interviewee and the guy presenting the video. And let's not forget the financials of such a venture. These things aren't built free of charge, you know.
practical and realistic here meaning building a thousand kilometers long tube filled with tons of ice. Sorry if I'm not waiting for this to be a thing in our lifetime or our kids lifetimes. Perhaps eventually once there's an actual space-building industry mostly automated by bots and large scale 3D printing in a few centuries. But to get there we certainly need the dreamers and the pioneers with much smaller scales...
Nah, don't need 'em. Give me a garage full of decent tools, a roast beef and pickle sandwich, and I'll get you and your kids to Tau Ceti. My latent gravitational bridge drives are all the talk around Epsilon Eridani.
@@crustyoldfart I think you missed the point of "practical engineering." Practical engineering takes into account cost, especially whether or not the cost of building an apparatus is feasible based on what it needs to do. If it's difficult, expensive, and time consuming, then it's not practical.
This interview was speechless this man has so much information that he just threw on to all of us that it just blows my mind. I had no idea that birds can sense that in the wind and there was an actual application for using it with a glider. This changes everything and I really hope that the people that are in this field working on this live a long life so they can give us as much knowledge as possible for us to go into interstellar space. Thank you so much for this interview
How birds can sense these conditions.... just recalled an article describing how birds use a quantum physics effect to percieve magnetic fields. I wonder what else they can see?
This guy is so endearing and honest. I'v paraphrased but - "what a beautiful thought to tread lightly on Earth, industry doesnt happen here any more " "Yeah we COULD do it that way but we must think of this, this and this" Really easy to understand, thoroughly enjoyed this video, gonna go check your other stuff now, subscribed!
If antimatter is central to the space propulsion, lots of applications are now attractive, even if Proxima ends up not viable. 1. Get out there a ways, with a quantum entanglement component. Still simultaneity a light week out? A light month out? 2. Further inspection of a dismissed anomaly--to make sure it should stay dismissed--the Pioneer effect. With antimatter-level thrust, we might be able to get much bigger scope of inspection, within only a decade. (The wider question: Are we seeing things through any type of gradual-onset filter? One only detectable if we get far enough out, and send signal back, to double-check.) 3. Chase down Oumuamua and inspect it. 4. Get out to our own solar gravitational lens, and have a look around--within a generation. 5. Lots of non-exotic app, involving the human component: opening up the outer solar system--without huge accumulation of radiation, shrunken-to-feasibility life support systems, etc. 6. Thorough clarification of Kuiper Belt reality. 7. Does the Oort Cloud exist? (NOT proven yet.)
These are awesome ideas for steampunk sci-fi! Ships whizzing around the solar system, gathering speed for a journey and doing the opposite in the destination. Relativistic weaponry firing shots that seem absolutely ridiculous but catching the enemy on its next turn around a planet. I absolutely love how that kind of space travel resembles sailing more than modern rocketry.
Testing those technologies in the solar system is very important in my opinion. The jump from chemical rockets to interstelar travel is huge. It would also be important to draw attention and funding to those projects.
@@Radrook353 We are going to have to create a new species that can survive zero Gs and high Gs but also able to have the thinking capacity of a human. Or just use robots.
Andrew Higgins needs to write a book for the general public. This is a really fascinating topic. I'd read it and it would likely inspire many people to pursue this goal.
really? so you are applauding someone who says it aint possible and is proud that his mind is limited by science dogma? well you guys aint scientists so it makes sense. like science fanboys. like the guy who couldnt play in a team but is an armchair coach. i salute your belief in the system. youtubers like this lower iq points. unless you are researching something you dont get to say its possible... i mean imagine a world where no one can lift over 100kg because everyone believed it to be impossible. in that world these guys would be talking about how no human has done it. this aint science. its a new form of religion. before we had electricity no one would have believed it. they are indoctrinated. anyone can recite doctrine.you only need memory and a belief that its true. true intelligence is discovering OR understanding a concept before its mainstream. why? because when its mainstream you just need to memorize. so please wake up science is just as sickening as religion was in the 90s. covid jabs was the best example. here is a prophecy this year its gonna be tried again in the winter. and the jab was doctrine. funny how 60-70 percent of white people took it out of fear. so many died. about 40 people died a week straight after that i know..... so please stop looking for someone with all the answers. every single human is a scientist. the so called scientists havent cured cancer or aids. havent found sustainable energy. and seem to be purely rhetoric based or making viruses that accidentally escape from a lab. so in a nutshell beat your fear of death and you see through their lies. stay afraid and they can make you change your gender or hate foreigners. the only time we can think like this is if we really understood everything. we dont. especially not a greed based culture. if you want some food for thought: biology chemistry physics ?????? - there is a fourth branch of science that no one knows about. however think about what these three study. if you get it it should be obvious what the fourth one does. however if you only have doctrine instead of critical thinking in you it shall never make sense. to those who get it... your welcome i dont think it has a name yet but that just means its brand new. however i strongly believe only those with a soul will see it. good luck. live strong namaste
The goal of space travel is not far off. String theory states particles communicate at very far distances. That communication can be the start to jump points. Going from one particle in space to another same like partical. Then, energy conversion with quantum physics. Converting matter to energy, and back to matter. This, I am sure, would be sub quantum level reverse engineering. Then splitting atoms safely can be the power necessary to manipulate weak and strong forces. Implementing what we already know from the information available.
This was the video that ultimately urged me to pursue my dream of studying physics, now I start my journey next week. It was content like Fraser's that has kept my flame stoked through the rain. Thank you for this great interview and the months of inspiration I've received from your many videos.
You are a dream killer Fraser, but you're also a dream creator because when you put down a person that is really driven to get something to work, they will someday get it done, one way or another.
In all the years I’ve been watching science content on UA-cam this is by far the most exciting one ever. I was glued to this interview from start to finish and am now trying to figure out if I can get to Montreal for the symposium. Thank you so much!
A what!? Holy crap, take my money. That would be so freakin' cute! We could dress 'em up in little tuxedos and bowties and put a little cummerbund on the conductor. We're doin' it, dude. We're doin' it.
Every time I hear about using the solar winds for interstellar travel I think about that Deep Space 9 episode (Explorers, Season 3, Ep. 22). Commander Sisko built a sailing ship based off of an ancient Bajoran design and achieved warp speed. I loved that show!
...I couldn't get over how over-the-top steampunk he made that ship. 😄 the hand crabks and manual tiller were too silly for me. If this concept pans out, the power is not going to be on the order of a small sailboat ffs.
@@jengleheimerschmitt7941 he was way over the top...I agree. He insinuated as much when he gave Jake a tour of the craft if memory serves me correctly lol...
I must be about your age Andrew, cos I was too young for Jupiter, but I remember Saturn, and then remember thinking of the eternity that would have to pass until Uranus. That eternity did, of course, pass (in only 5 years!!). Then Neptune came around. I haven't thought of those events in the way you just made me think of them since they happened. Thanks for that, thank you sincerely.
OMG! I know Joe Jackson! I used to work in the residential A/V feild out of a suite RIGHT NEXT DOOR to H-Bar Technologies, and actually got to tour their facility after asking him "Doesn't it require 'dammit' magnetic containment to store antimatter?", to which he responded "No, nothing nearly as extreme as you might imagine." He then showed me around and even showed me the containment vessels (two DIFFERENT types) which were only approximately the size of a large home deep freezer. Just thouht I'd share...
This is the opposite of click bait. Thiskept appearing on my feed, I clicked on it, and really enjoyed it. I'm now going to get a lot of magnets from hard drives, a really strong motorcycle helmet and a very long snorkel and aim for Alpha C. I might need a really big mobile phone to let you all know what I find.
That was a fun interview. It makes me wish I were immortal to see what kind of technologies and discoveries are going to happen long after I would've died.
Don't worry, humans won't make it to be interstellar species. The proof is the universe, if it was possible, the billion, trillions of stars would have coughed up at least one civilization.
I’m about a year late watching this. I’m really liking this guest. Explanations about the solar winds were easier to understand than I had previously thought. Thank you. Also I’d like to hear more about the coils that were mentioned.
Wow, what a great interview with so many great ideas! I feel like a kid or teenager reading Carl Sagan's book "Our Universe" and finding all those great ideas in there, for propulsion for space exploration (and also the ideas about more or less balloons to explore gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn). But now here are fresh ideas, on some orders of magnitude even better... Wow! How could I have missed this for a year, but finally UA-cam is persistently showing me the thumbnail of this interview in the recent days.. And it's worth every minute of watching it!
I when the realities are told, it is not something to be disheartened, it is actually teaching us what cant work, making us realise we must re-think on how to do the impossible. I very much think certain things are possible but we live in an age like when we were trying to figure out powered flight. By learning what doesn't work, we learn what can work and eventually, will get there.
Agreed. Although, I would add that it is helpful if your dreams are consistent with the laws of the conservation of energy and the conservation of momentum.
@@A_J_Higgins I'd say it's helpful to know the difference between fiction and reality. They are very different, but both have their part to play. Staying within the realm of the possible is eminently practical. But dreaming the impossible can be fun, and provides us with mental energy. And sometimes, just sometimes, imagining the impossible may lead to breakthroughs. That being said, I also don't think anyone will break the laws you just mentioned. Some pursuits are foolhardy. Unfortunately, we don't know beforehand how fruitful an approach may be.
There is a 1 billionth scale model of the Solar System along the Melbourne foreshores with a 1.4m diameter Sun centred in St Kilda, a 12.5mm Earth 150m away and Pluto 5.8km away near Port Melbourne. When you walk the distance between 140mm Jupiter and 116mm Saturn (assuming they actually were in alignment, which they mostly aren't) you truly appreciate just how much nothing there is in space. I missed it the first time I was there, but a 215mm Proxima Centauri is near the Sun in this scale, based on having travelled the entire circumference of the Earth to reach it. The scale you mention of the Sun being the size of a grapefruit, the Earth would be much smaller than a peppercorn.
Yes! I live in port melbourne and over the Covid lockdown made it my goal to walk the entire solar system with my Doberman. We finally did it but we were pretty tired afterward lol….
I enjoy the channel Meatball studios here on UA-cam. One of the videos begins with a quark and goes to the end of the universe. It is all just a whole bunch of nothingness. My favorite theory for the shape of the universe is a giant 5D donut with a Big Bang in the center. If that is true then there are probably many such donuts (and other baked goods) sparsely distributed in something even bigger and mostly empty something.
On many stages of human development people were convinced that this or that was impossible. And it wasn’t that they did know nothing about the world. They had science and technology on some level. But then after some time it turned out that people discovered the whole level of rules of the world and suddenly everybody can fly - just the way our ancestors couldn’t imagine. Today we know it’s impossible to travel to other stars or galaxies in human lifespan but who knows what we discover in the future? Maybe it becomes possible in ways we can’t even comprehend.
I believe its fundamentally different. We are watching birde fly since we are humans. Say we found out its about wings in 1500 BC in the mithos of Icarus. First flight 1903. We never seen a body doing interstellar travel except maybe astroids. And math will always be same, unless we just tear up reality(space-time) .
@@alperenozturk9235 Not at all. Yes we imagined we fly like birds which even now is impossible. But we do fly today. Just different way that our ancestors could think. The same can be with traveling between stars. Now we think about star ships and warp drives because our imagination is a projection of our world. We know that faster than light travel through space is imposible for us just like flying like a bird. But we know that the space itself can expand faster than light. We certainly do not know everything, what is possible and even less what is impossible. So I'd say maybe one day we, or what we'll become, will be able to travel between stars in ways we humans can't even imagine.
@@motomono I see where you coming from but you missed one point. We haven't seen any body doing what you have, or other hopefull thinkers describe. I believe we as humans are pretty much stuck in our near space. And we will have our minions(small or big machinery dedicated in simple operations) will scatter near star systems for information and resources.
Fascinating interview, thanks Frasier! Imagine getting up to 20 - 30% without a Jupiter massed quantity of negative energy! Didn't think I was going to watch the entire thing when I started it due to the length, but once he started talking I was hooked.
New topic for John: Dynamic soaring. THANK YOU! I see applications in particle acceleration. I see applications in plasma control. I see applications in 30 story building air flow processes. I see thermodynamic applications akin to sonic refrigeration. You have just given me months of things to think about. I will never get any work done.
Unlike many commenters below who seemingly take all ideas total literally and then bash them... I really enjoyed the tossing of ideas around. I enjoy the process of speculation and thinking outside of the box.
0:01 _"I feel like I am a dream killer"_ Heck yeah! Back then I showed up on the channel, and started dreaming of visiting a place with such lush vegetation as Fraser's backgrounds, only to later learn it's just very advanced green screen CGI! ( ;-;)
I would *love* it if we went back to Neptune in my lifetime! I've loved Neptune since I was a kid - a long time ago - and even wrote a short sci-fi story about Neptune in middle school. Really enjoyed this conversation!
What's stopping you? Oh ----you mean you want ME to send you. Don't hold your breath. Scientists have thousands of bright ideas that they yearn to have taxpayers pay for their fantasies.
Money spent on this endeavor will reap untold advancements in our daily lives. Hats off to the professor who can make a difficult to understand subject understandable to those of us lucky enough to hear him speak. Thanks to Professor Higginsber, and Fraser Cain for tuning me in.
Money spent on anything to do with space is mostly diverted to 'science educator' hires who do nothing but talk all day. It's a farce at this point. Our only hope is the private sector.
Used to work on the problem of getting just a probe to Proxima - even with ablative photonics that was a wicked problem to solve. People? Hard to see how at the moment, short of the slow route - generation ships. First, there is the time issue, even if we partially solve this using entanglement for communication, I cannot see how society can evolve in current paradigms to the flexible enough to embrace effectively time travellers. Then significant size and speed require force fields to deflect the otherwise catastrophic collision events. Getting around that with e.g. Albiquerre relies on being able to harness singularities or other exotic matter and put it relatively close to the passengers, which is many orders of magnitude harder problem than mere deflection.
Actually, all the Planets spiral away from the Sun over long periods of time like the Moon Spirals away from the Earth. This is a change in the magnitudes of each of the pair of forces since the larger orb always gains mass faster than the smaller orb of any of the orb pairs. The Sun Gains mass far faster than it looses mass converting Hydrogen to Helium, and getting rid of solar energy. The Sun spirals inward toward its Sun-Planet Barycenter, and the planets spiral away from the Sun-Planets Barycenter. The same is true of the Earth-Moon Barycenter. The Earth spirals inward toward the barycenter, while the Moon spirals away from the pair's barycenter. Currently the mass ratio is very close to 81.3 to 1.0 This number will gradually increase at an ever increasing rate. The Earth accelerates the moon to an ever higher orbit due to its increasing mass, and decelerates itself to a lower orbit. The Moon tries to do the same but looses the battle at a mass rate of 81.3 to 1.0 . The Earth wins at 81.3 / 82.3 ratio and the moon looses at a rate of 1 .0 / 82.3. The Earth spirals inward at an ever slower rate, while the Moon spirals away at an ever increasing rate. The absolute value of the distance between the two Orbs will continue to increase. The time for the Moon to complete one orbit around the Earth tends to increase. Since 1965, they people with powerful telescopes have been bouncing laser beams off the Moon, and one of the Apollo Missions put a corner reflector on the Moon so more of the Laser light gets back to the source telescopes. The out and back time keeps increasing by milliseconds per years, so the distance keeps increasing by around 38.1 mm per year ( If I remember correctly ), questionable. The Change in the distance, divided by the distance, is proportional to the change in the mass of the system divided by the summation of the mass of the system which is also proportion to the change in the time divide by 2 times the elapsed time of the oldest and biggest orb in the system. The change in distance is one part in 9.0888 E 9, so the age of the oldest member ( Earth ) is 4544.4 million years. Two partner systems are easy to calculate, but multiple partner systems are very difficult to calculate, and any change in any of the ratios, like mass, distances, ages, external material supplies changes everything else, and the results will never be the same. In short Chaos.
The Robert L. Forward book Rocheworld is still one of my favorites where a large laser in the Lagrange point behind Mercury and harnessing the power of the Sun - I forget the exact details - is used to power a large light sail propelling a large exploration vehicle. The sail is designed to break in segments part way through the journey with the outer sections being blown ahead of the craft where they then focus the laser from Earth back to the sail on the craft decelerating it for arrival at Barnard's Star. One question I do have is how do we protect sensitive components and eventually people for long range high speed travel through interstellar space. GCRs are likely a real threat to astronauts at even interplanetary ranges and at relativistic speeds the thin interstellar medium becomes high energy particles constantly bombarding the spacecraft. The faster you go the worse this becomes.
I read Robert L. Forward's book "Rocheworld" as a teenager in the mid-1980s and this book is what started me on the path to the research I describe in his video. Forward's work continues to be a huge inspiration for the community researching interstellar flight.
The concern about GCRs is very real, but note that GCRs are already highly relativistic (traveling at 99% the speed of light and faster with GeV to TeV energies). So, the effect that GCRs will have on a spacecraft traveling at 20-30% the speed of light is not any worse than what our spacecraft already experience today. We have figured out how to deal with GCRs on our present day spacecraft (mainly, always have backup computers on board and on the ready, so when the main computer experiences a bit-flip, you just switch to the backup). The other concern is the interstellar medium (the ISM) will now also be impacting the spacecraft at mega-electron-volt (MeV) energies-since the spacecraft is moving through it at a fraction of the speed of light-and this will result in gigarads of radiation exposure over the mission duration. However, these particle energies are (relative to GCRs) low and manageable. The protons and other particles of the ISM will impact and sputter away a fraction of a millimeter of the leading edge of the spacecraft, but this should be manageable with a modest amount of shielding.
Catching up on all the space news and stories. Loved this interview...even though most of it blasted over my head at 10% the speed of light. Thanks Fraser for another great interview
That anti matter factory would be interesting. Would have to be built in the middle of nowhere. Kilograms of anti matter and matter going up in an accident would be quite a headache Ahh, 13:00, Andrew said to build it in space, yes, that would be wise
@@elinoreberkley1643 Or Mars. Keep that antimatter factory far away. I ounce of antimatter released woulf yield 12 Megatons of TNT equivalent power. A kilo is 2.2046 pounds. A pound (British Imperial weights and measures) is 16 ounces. So, the mini Tsar-Bomba detonated in 1961 yield 58 megatons is 4.3 ounces. A kilo of positronium released due a magnetic vacuum bottle breach would create a mushroom cloud maybe hundreds of miles wide. A country destroying or even civilization collapsing event.
When I was around 11 or 12 years old, I had this idea of a solar wind surfer spacecraft. I imagined it riding the edge of a propagating solar wind/wave and gaining huge amounts of speed. I had read somewhere how surfers could gain speed faster riding a wave perpendicular vs parallel, and I extrapolated the idea out. I more recently learned about dynamic soaring, and the amazing speeds they are able to achieve with RC gliders. I never mentally extrapolated the same idea out to solar winds like I did with surfing. That's a wild concept!
Only just found this video. Wish I'd seen it when it was first aired. ... I've got a LOT of catching up to do - so I'm going to be up all night watching videos, crunching numbers and generally giving my grey matter a much needed hell of a work out. Thank you 🥰🥰😊😊
>Scientists have discovered magnetosheath jets, fast plasma streams, in Jupiter's magnetic environment New article in nature I saw and remembered this video, seems like there's a difference in energy that could be exploited there for the techniques mentioned in this video also mentions similar jets could be around other planets. I love the idea of Jupiter not just being the go-to planet for gravity assists but also plasma assists for either acceleration or deceleration with a plasma magnet/q-drive/e-sail, such a convenient planet lol
My interest in the last decade has been in nuclear power and molten salt reactors specifically. The initial interest was in slow spectrum molten salt reactors using a fluoride/lithium/beryllium salt modeled on the Oak Ridge Molten Salt Reactor Experiment which ran for four year in the 1960s. Recent interest has shifted to fast spectrum molten salt reactors that use chloride salts which are safer, have better understood chemistry and are much cheaper. Sodium chloride is table salt. The advantage of fast spectrum reactors is at over 1 MeV U-238 and Th-232 become weakly fissile and add to the neutron budget. These reactors will run on spent nuclear fuel and plutonium from decommissioned weapons. They can also include depleted uranium as part of the fuel cycle. All this means there are very large stockpiles of fuel for these reactors currently being stored at considerable cost as high level waste. This could be the ample energy source needed to power an anti-matter production facility. Also molten salt reactors run much hotter than water moderated and cooled nuclear reactors making them far more practical for use in space. A cold water source is not needed to produce the thermal efficiency to draw the required amount of heat out of the reactor core. A molten salt reactor on a spaceship or a Moon base would use radiator fins for cooling. Hook one of these up to a Hall thruster and you have a much more efficient way to accelerate at least at interplanetary distances.
Moving to HALEU at about 18% enrichment as the new standard fuel for civilian use would be a good first step and is achievable in the near term with commercial ready reactors. TRISO packaging as standard could be an added bonus for a new standard. Dramatic advantages can be obtained just by updating the standard fuel.
Well compare the evolution of space travel with nautical travel: at first we figured out how to row a boat, much later sails were added (also a drag device). With those we discovered new continents, had the VoC era, and much much later giant engines the size of houses were built to propel ships regardless of the elements
The idea he finishes describing around 29 minutes in makes me think of a non mechanical gyroscope with layers of counteropposing spinning fields creating opposing perpendicular forces. I've no clue how you could redirect one of the opposing vectors 180° to act in sync with the other one, but such a rotating field might also be part of what would allow and control steering and bouncing off the differential winds.
UAP smiling. [Unacknowledged Access Project]. We have been there and done that. We can take ET home. UAP, is Quite a malleable Acronym, now wouldn't you say.
I have always dreamt about space travel myself but now that I'm approaching 60 I've finally realized that it's a pretty good idea to stay here for me. I've also been telling dreamers the sobering facts about the challenges with space travel. They weren't happy. This video was great. I'm about to listen again. I'm not sure if you asked about the risk associated with colliding with some dust particle when traveling at insane speeds. Do we know the probability distribution for dust particles of various sizes in interstellar space? If we did we could calculate a probability distribution for arriving at the star as swiss cheese or as a cloud of atoms. Or still be alive.
Exactly. The amount of energy imparted from a tiny particle at even 5% the speed of light would obliterate the vehicle. the shielding materials needed ruins the laser based propulsion entirely.
Dont forget we know nothing about intrrstellar space. We know theres a "lot" of hydrogen out there. And scientists seem to assume it is evenly distributed. But that is unlikely due to gravity..more likely clouds of hydrogen andpossibly other things. Sp youre happily zipping along at .1 c and...your entire vessel hits a cloud of hydrogen and incinerates in a millisecond
@@UKnowIfUKnow Interstellar dust grains are a significant concern, as I discussed with Fraser, but this issue is not a complete show-stopper: Interstellar dust grains are micron-sized and smaller. Alas, we cannot test these kinds of impacts (at 30% the speed of light) in the lab, but we can calculate how much energy they could explosively release on impact: At 30% the speed of light, it is about 10 J of energy. (This is just ½ mass * velocity^2, so you can check the numbers yourself.) This energy is the equivalent of a firecracker going off. It will certainly do some local damage, but the spacecraft can be designed with this in mind, including shielding and self-healing materials. Such an impact will not vaporize the spacecraft.
Very good Fraser. I would very much like to continue to see your skepticism and sharp logic. For example, let me say about the question and the possibility of our species and the desire and longing for the stars: Regarding the antimatter drive: - In 1996 some PICOGRAM anti-hydrogen atoms were successfully produced at CERN in Geneva for a few NANOSECONDS. Andrew Higgins speaks of a few kilograms of it for a very, very long travel time. What quantitative progress is there from 1996 to 2023? To the sun sails: - Tiny solar sails have hardly any capable control mechanisms, far-reaching communication options and complex orientation apparatuses integrated into them. Although some tiny life forms on Earth seem to be able to do it with brains of 0.025 mm2. The mayflies.
If we could achieve 2% of the speed of light in the solar system means that we could get to Pluto in 10 days! I had to do the calculation in Wolfram alpha, before the end of the episode, so I have no idea if they address this in the video
What assumption did you make about acceleration and deceleration time? (If you ignored it entirely, you're dramatically underestimating the time to travel short-ish distances like those within the solar system or even to reach the nearest stars.
Yes but you would just zoom past it.. you would have to accelerate half the distance then decelerate the other half. So still looking at months or years together there
I'm glad we don't have to wait for a warp drive to be invented to get a closeup look at exoplanets! I don't think I'll live to 2050 to see a probe launched to Alpha C, but my son almost certainly will and that blows my mind.
Wonderful chat, I think locating those solar wind pockets of turbulence in real-time will be a challenge. I’m not sold on the interstellar mass ejection idea, there is no way to extract energy from the interstellar medium without pumping out as much enegy to collect it. You cannot add mass to your craft in the middle of your trip, if it’s mass that was already on at mission start..why was it added to begin with? The idea of catching electrons with a mag field and using it as a propellant is a far shot in the interstellar medium where there are fewer electrons.
I agree the idea of extracting energy from the interstellar medium that is blowing over the spacecraft (as viewed from the moving reference frame of the spacecraft) is difficult to accept at first glance; I had the same initial response when Jeff Greason proposed the idea (his "q-drive" concept). But after working through the analysis and equations, I confirmed it is not a perpetual motion machine. The q-drive simply concentrates the kinetic energy in the mass onboard a vehicle initially loaded with reaction mass and already in motion into a smaller mass (the payload of the vehicle without reaction mass) by expelling the reaction mass backward. To answer your question: "why was it added to begin with?" The answer is: Because that mass had an initial velocity that was created by another propulsion device (fusion rocket, solar sail, etc.). The q-drive then concentrates this kinetic energy into the smaller mass of just the payload while expelling most of the initial mass. Again, you are concentrating the initial kinetic energy of the larger vehicle into a smaller mass (thus, making it go faster), but doing this requires interacting with another medium (the interstellar medium, in this case). This is entirely consistent with the conservation of energy and momentum. If you want the full details, you can find Jeff Greason's paper “A Reaction Drive Powered by External Dynamic Pressure" which is linked in the video description above. This paper (and the subsequent work we have done building upon it) has gone through peer review prior to being published.
Maybe an interesting thought: I wonder if there is a way to collect mass as one performs gravitational assists and solar wind turns that would allow for increasing one's kinetic energy without, as it were, gaining velocity and thereby running out of solar system? That is, in stage 1 of your sailing trip, you intentionally slow yourself by grabbing stuff (gas, whatever) as you perform these maneuvers and then once you reach a certain level of mass, you start stage 2, stop accumulating mass, and accelerate up to some crazy speed, then in stage 3, you take advantage of the energy of your accumulated mass and extreme speeds via Q-drive ideas by shooting your accumulated mass out the back.... Great video in any case! Really enjoyed it.
Amazing talk thank you very much! So glad I subbed to this channel. Future generations are going to witness these Interstellar missions and they are in for a real treat! I'm glad the rest of us are around to see the first small steps taken!
First, I am struck with how much I love Professor Higgins' bookshelf (but would hate to dust it as often as I would need to, were it here on this gravel road where I live, LOL!). And then I was able to pay attention to what he was saying, after I got done ogling the bookshelf. Just had to back it up to actually listen. 😄 The concepts he shared with us are quite fascinating! They could truly be used to send some kind of probes waaaay out there, and send back TONS of new information! A like and comment for the care and feeding of the Almighty Algorithm. ❤️ ❤️
I've always been a bigger fan of "hard" sci-fi, namely the kind that focuses on fusion drives and only ever mentions warp drives as "theoretical curiosities" that we haven't ever achieved. So this is a welcome breath of fresh air. So tired of the "aliens" having the FTL tech and gifting it to us. So tired of us discovering how "easy" it is to go FTL ourselves. It trivializes the true difficulty of all things space travel, and in so doing it loses a lot of it's punch. There's some part of me that says "NASA and the like are purpose-oriented to tackle the most technically challenging areas of engineering we have yet faced, allowing a human to exist in an environment that has never encountered a being like them". And the rest of me goes "That's just a hair's breadth distant from being literally impossible, so why are all these sci-fi media depicting it being as easy as driving to the grocery store?" The story shouldn't be "XYZ plot, but in space". The story should be "Space, period." Unfortunately, nobody seems to be interested in writing that kind of sci-fi, it all seems to be in books written in the 40's to the -60's, with only a few select authors. More of it is needed IMO. Few example plots I can think of, just because there's oh-so-many ways for your ship to betray you in the most insidious of lethal ways: Life support systems fail on you? Better hope the whole crew's not in hibernation, or that the automated systems can wake up enough engineers to patch it together enough to get you to a safe place, else you're gonna have an encounter with The Cold Equations. Engines malfunction? Probably not gonna have the tools or materials to fix that, if it's a nuclear engine you better cut the failed one loose, and you better also have brought a spare (you're not gonna repair the magnetic bottle on your fusion drive if it got a railgun round shot thru the containment field coils cryo plumbing, and not JUST because it's "lethal in mere seconds" radioactive). By the way, you can't just say "oh it's not radioactive because it's using D-He3 fusion which is aneutronic", because even a D-He3 reactor is only "a lot less" radioactive, not "not radioactive", you're still doing high energy atomic physics, meaning D-D fusion is gonna be happening in that reactor in side-reactions, which emits even more neutrons than D-He3 fusion. The only reason it's "Less" neutronic is because those D-D side reactions are side reactions and not the main focus, so they don't happen nearly as often. Still plenty of them to cause the reactor itself to saturate any kind of radiation detector you care to point at it, with the drive turned off for 30 days and THEN measured. Colony run short on supplies, like needing a water pipe? Use lasers to 3-d print a stone or concrete water pipe out of local regolith, because if you use a pipe from anywhere remotely near the ship's power reactor or nuclear engines, the whole colony is gonna be fighting any number of "new and interesting" cancers. You thought Radium Jaw was bad, what do you think happens when the very water you drink and bathe with has been turned radioactive by a wrongly-selected piece of plumbing? Oh and it's not just pipes, valves and fittings are bad news too. So is something as mundane as an O-ring. Literally any matter that has been irradiated should be banned from contact with the potable water, ventilation, sanitation, or any other system that helps support the crew. Yes, that includes the sewer pipes, because you're almost certainly going to be recycling the wastewater from those systems. Alien contatct? Nope, no sentients, microbes at best. Alternately, if you do think we can contact sentients, it will be them contacting us, and us stumbling on to their transmissions as noise with strangely self-consistent patterns in it. Extremely extremely faint signals, we'd need at the MINIMUM a radio telescope on the Moon's far side to even have a chance of intercepting the signals so sent. The signal we sent, intentionally, probably didn't even make it to Alpha Cent, distance wise. That's how faint things get over such large distances. If you want a truly interesting set-piece, maybe us humans figure out that a pulsar isn't quite as perfectly regular as it should be in it's timing, instead it's somehow modulated. And then thru years of analysis using the most powerful supercomputers, we figure out that there is data encoded in this modulation. More years of analysis and we can figure out what that data is, if it's even digital data (who knows, they might develop computers based on "neuron" analogue cell-type constructions rather than doped semiconductors, depends on how easy it is to purify elements without resorting to what passes for biology on their world). Point is, expect it to look like "oddly patterned noise" for 5+ generations of analysis before we figure out what it is. Also expect some new religion to pop up to worship whatever it is they think it is we found when we actually still don't have a clue. Really really drive home the point of how so much of actual new territory being explored by science is best described as "fumbling around in the dark inside a house", but the only data you have is the theory of what a house is, namely something like "a house is composed of a series of connected rooms sharing a roofing system, with one or more floors, passage between floors being facilitated by stairs, ladders, or elevators". And we don't know what rooms, roofs, floors, passages, stairs, ladders, or elevators are yet either. Basically sometimes science is just flailing around in the dark and noting down what you bump into or knock over, and if you knock something over noting what noise it made when it fell.
What isn't possible today becomes possible tomorrow. Not every idea comes to fruition, but when our understanding gets an update, problems can crumble away.
The greatest specific impulse I can currently conceive of without having to go into things like antimatter: Strap a powerful ion drive, to a thin film radio active solar sail, lined on the side facing away from the sun with a composite material wired to harvest electrical energy from the radio active decay to feed the ion thruster. Or several lightweight but powerful ion thrusters such as the EAPS. A thin film solar panel solar sail will also be pretty good, but the radio active one is better. Heck. Maybe it would be possible to make a thin film radio active solar panel material that also harvest the radioactive decay similar to the first scheme.
Those are all good ideas, and they have all been examined in some detail. Related to your thinking, the idea of using a radioactive sail that gets thrust from the fragments (alpha particles) it shoots out has also been explored. While all these ideas would work, they are all still rockets (ion thrusters, radioisotope sails, etc.) that obey the rocket equation, and as such, are not going to get to above about 1% the speed of light. Their exhaust velocities are limited (3-4% of c) and using a radioactive source results in carrying a lot of dead mass (because not all the fissile material ends up being used). If you are willing to wait 500 years for your probe to get to the nearest stars, these technologies will work. But if you want to get data back from a mission within the lifetime of the people who launched it, we are going to need to develop technologies that permit us to go faster.
@@A_J_Higgins Yeah. I was just talking big ISP. I'm mostly interested in colonizing our own solar system. Practical interstellar travel will happen when it happens.
I know this video is old, but this has to be said. Our species needs more people like you and the scientists you interview. As a civilization we need to rekindle our interests in exploring beyond the walls we have set for ourselves else we will stagnate. You and others have settled into the roles that the giants of Bill Nye and Carl Sagan have done before you, and I hope that you do for others what they have done for me. For us to succeed as a species we need to turn our gaze starwards as any alternative will never be as bright.
How might the intersecting solar winds at Alpha Centauri (3 stars interacting) allow a greater ability to generate dynamic lift than our single sun allows? Has this been considered? I'm picturing 3 soap bubbles connected together vs. our single soap bubble.
Side note: I just watched that video of a glider using dynamic soaring, and it is freaking impressive... and a little bit scary. The whole time I'm like, "How is this thing not ripping itself apart?" because it's going so fast. I'd hate to be one of the spectators if that thing ever went out of control. ua-cam.com/video/4eFD_Wj6dhk/v-deo.html
A quick calculation says it's pulling around 50 G's!!! The design and construction of such a glider is very exotic engineering because of the staggering G-loads and need to provide useable lift/drag at 550 MPH. The aerodynamics seems nearly nutty. Everything must highly specialized. It's not a balsa wood thing you can buy at a hobby shop!
@@danbaker7191 The wings are made of a laminated sandwich of carbon composites to exacting standards. I build various types of RC plane parts and even I would have difficulty building a dynamic soaring wing, even with the correct equipment. Lightweight strength isn't so much the issue; it's building in the appropriate warping tolerances, so as not to effect the wing's performance too much.
@@skateboardingjesus4006 All true but a couple points. 1. Carbon Fiber is really, really good for such applications. 2. This thing is small and light. It's a lot easier to build something to withstand 50 Gs that weighs 1kg than it is to design one that weighs 200kg.
I wish people would stop talking about Proxima Centauri as an example of a possible Earth 2.0. Proxima Centauri is, like the vast majority of these so-called "habitable zone" exoplanets, a red dward system where the exoplanets are spinning very close and rapidly around the star and so are probably tidally locked and being blasted by the numerous solar flares typical of red dwarves. In other words, a not so habitable exoplanetary system. The big problem is that right now, our main method of detecting exoplanets, the transit method, is heavily skewed towards finding planets with a very short periodicity around their stars, which means that they are located very close to their stars and have periods of several Earth days or weeks. This means that only those around red dwarves, with their low light output, would be in a habitable zone at these close orbits. This means that these red dwarf habitable zone planets will be tidally locked and will be blasted constantly by the solar flares of these red dwarves. The other two stars of the Alpha Centauri triple star system are a type G and type K star - and neither have exoplanets that we have so far detected, which does not mean that they do not have exoplanets, just that the piss poor transit method that we have is not able to detect them. The theories of star formation that we have would indicated that almost certainly, many other solid bodies would coalesce around a forming young star. If the plane of the planetary system does not cross the star in the same plane as our line of sight to that star, we will simply not be able to see these exoplanets using the transit method. The sun is a type G star, and I would be more excited if the Alpha Centauri A type G star was found to have exoplanets in the habitable zone.
The closest known black hole is either V Puppis (960 ly) or HR 6819 (1,000 ly). I proposel that we build an O'Neill Cylinder with an anti-matter drive to go there. This is a generation starship that use the black hole to slow it done and enter orbit about the black hole. We talking a journey of about 5,000-10,000 years or more at 20% of c. The mission to start a base to build Halo Drive starships as proposed by Kipper, "Fuel-free Relativistic Propulsion of Large Masses via Recycled Boomerang Photons". This will open select parts of the galaxy, hopping from black hole to black hole. The bad news, to get back to Earth is HARD - maybe we could launch a Halo Drive starship with just enough moment to reach Earth and Bussard ramjet for breaking. Starting with 10,000 people in the first O'Neill starship, they will have descendants throughout the galaxy that will far out number the population of the Solar System in about 50,000 short years or so. STRONG DREAM REIGN HERE.
Here are the distances to each of the mentioned star systems: 1. **TRAPPIST-1:** TRAPPIST-1 is located approximately 39.5 light-years away from Earth. 2. **Proxima Centauri:** Proxima Centauri is the closest known star to the Sun, located approximately 4.24 light-years away from Earth. 3. **Kepler-186:** Kepler-186 is located approximately 582 light-years away from Earth. 4. **Kepler-62:** Kepler-62 is located approximately 1,200 light-years away from Earth. 5. **LHS 1140:** LHS 1140 is located approximately 40 light-years away from Earth. 6. **Tau Ceti:** Tau Ceti is located approximately 11.9 light-years away from Earth. These distances are approximate and may vary slightly depending on the method used to determine stellar distances and any updates in astronomical measurements.
This guy gets it. Best way to get humans to do something, is to tell them they can’t do it. I like yer style dude.
The only way humans "explore" is when they are refugees or invaders. The US went to the moon to show a big totem to the Soviets: We Are Strong! Don't Invade! Exploring is evolutionary dangerous, so it is only done out of greed or necessity.
Best way to get the most high quality info is to tell everybody they have no clue and tell your theories with absolute conviction. Sit back and wait for quality responses. Then tell everyone they are wrong and tell them why. Humans love to prove others wrong and do their best work to spite you.
@@Midg-td3ty 😆 so true my friend 🙏🤝
Why has no one told the medical researchers they can´t cure cancer yet? I can´t believe how much time iv wasted running marathons, wearing ribbons and making donations. I could have just wrote the doctors a mocking letter.
@@1112viggo you think there aren’t researchers and doctors trying to cure cancer for the fame of being the one who figured out the impossible? 🤔
Having had the privilege of having him as a professor, very inspirational to hear him speak on this topic!
That's really cool, thanks for sharing!!
Oh, I bet it's _very_ cool, having learned from him yourself, to have him on here & seeing him teach the rest of us this one little bit, too. 😁
Did he ever slap you?
Hmmm, as a physicist a lot of this seems quite impossible to build. one kg of antimatter... we cant't even create a few micrograms, et alone keep it contained in a space capsule
@@SwissPGO the fact we can produce it is important. The rest seems to be a matter of having lots of energy available (and the ability to keep it flowing) for the capture/containment step. the ability to store it will be a game changer.
I was supposed to be falling asleep to the sweet sounds of science, and when this talk got going I bolted wide awake and my imagination just went wild. What a gorgeous idea!! This is the most exciting thing I’ve heard since I first learned about the solar gravitational lens about a year ago. I cannot wait to see where this goes!!
Glad I'm not the only one that plays science videos to fall asleep to, LOL! I have a few playlists of things like year one university-level geology lectures and such, with people with a pleasant voice that are nice to nod off to! I strongly suggest you find Journey To the Microcosmos, which is a fantastic channel with Hank Green using his soft voice; especially around 1-2 years ago his voice was top-calm - I LOVE falling asleep to that voice!
(Edited to correct the channel name)
Love journey to the microcosmos!!
@Mary Ann the Nytowl I was putting this on to fall asleep too 😴 I love certain talks when falling asleep.
DIAGRAMS would be a choice supplement!
@@MaryAnnNytowlI do the same. I love when I’m in the right sleep stage and the volume is just right and I literally begin to dream what’s being said on the video.
I remember as a kid, I used to think stars were just little specs of light that you could touch in outer-space lol I remember the day in school that I found out that those specs were actually distant sun’s just like our sun but super far away & you could never touch them! I was mind blown 🤯 Even today when I explain to other people that don’t know about space that those specs of light you see in the sky are actually distant sun’s just like our sun! it’s always fun to see them be mind blown just as I was all those years ago ☀️💫🚀🌎
There are many people who still don't know that those are suns or have a vague idea
You didn’t learn that, until you were school-aged? 😂 Did your parents not read to you, from books?
@@kirillsleptsov1680 wait what? Which people do you know that don't know about stars being stars like the Sun? Anyone would know that much.
@@SahilP2648 just regular people around
@@WizardClipAudio oh superior, are we?
46:26 on just a pure drag device like this can get you to the solar gravitational focus in in less than 10 years
Wow, amazing.
Andrew Higgins seems a really down-to-earth guy for wanting to go interstellar.
Good to see that someone like Andrew Higgins is running the Interstellar Symposium.
There is a solution: a biological immortality. Is a breakthrough for an interstellar travel :D
@@xeniyal7454 well, one can also tweak the passage of time, it's as simple as adding mass.
then, once you pass through the Kerr's blackhole singularity you can probably be anywhere.
@@milanstevic8424 still not good enough. If we achieve biological immortality soon, me and you have pretty good chances to step on Proxima Centaurus B. Without it, we die before even probe achieve it.
@@milanstevic8424 lol you actually believe in an actual singularity? I’ve got news for you.
@@ModestestRUST buddy, Kerr's blackhole singularity is a scientific name and stuff, it's not a belief system.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity#:~:text=While%20in%20a%20non%2Drotating,as%20a%20%22ring%20singularity%22.
Share the news anyway, but keep in mind that no one has yet proved singularities to not exist, it's completely untestable at this point.
Theoretical physicists are great but practical engineering is arguably more fascinating when discussing topics like this! Great convo!
" practical engineering is arguably more fascinating ". YES, and it's much more difficult expensive and time consuming.
Hilarious that you mention it when the practical engineering is entirely glossed over and taken as a given both by the interviewee and the guy presenting the video. And let's not forget the financials of such a venture. These things aren't built free of charge, you know.
practical and realistic here meaning building a thousand kilometers long tube filled with tons of ice. Sorry if I'm not waiting for this to be a thing in our lifetime or our kids lifetimes.
Perhaps eventually once there's an actual space-building industry mostly automated by bots and large scale 3D printing in a few centuries. But to get there we certainly need the dreamers and the pioneers with much smaller scales...
Nah, don't need 'em. Give me a garage full of decent tools, a roast beef and pickle sandwich, and I'll get you and your kids to Tau Ceti. My latent gravitational bridge drives are all the talk around Epsilon Eridani.
@@crustyoldfart I think you missed the point of "practical engineering." Practical engineering takes into account cost, especially whether or not the cost of building an apparatus is feasible based on what it needs to do. If it's difficult, expensive, and time consuming, then it's not practical.
This interview was speechless this man has so much information that he just threw on to all of us that it just blows my mind. I had no idea that birds can sense that in the wind and there was an actual application for using it with a glider. This changes everything and I really hope that the people that are in this field working on this live a long life so they can give us as much knowledge as possible for us to go into interstellar space. Thank you so much for this interview
Speechless! It was full of speech.
@@Peter_Trevor Ha,Ha!😆
How birds can sense these conditions.... just recalled an article describing how birds use a quantum physics effect to percieve magnetic fields. I wonder what else they can see?
This guy is so endearing and honest. I'v paraphrased but -
"what a beautiful thought to tread lightly on Earth, industry doesnt happen here any more "
"Yeah we COULD do it that way but we must think of this, this and this"
Really easy to understand, thoroughly enjoyed this video, gonna go check your other stuff now, subscribed!
If antimatter is central to the space propulsion, lots of applications are now attractive, even if Proxima ends up not viable.
1. Get out there a ways, with a quantum entanglement component. Still simultaneity a light week out? A light month out?
2. Further inspection of a dismissed anomaly--to make sure it should stay dismissed--the Pioneer effect. With antimatter-level thrust, we might be able to get much bigger scope of inspection, within only a decade. (The wider question: Are we seeing things through any type of gradual-onset filter? One only detectable if we get far enough out, and send signal back, to double-check.)
3. Chase down Oumuamua and inspect it.
4. Get out to our own solar gravitational lens, and have a look around--within a generation.
5. Lots of non-exotic app, involving the human component: opening up the outer solar system--without huge accumulation of radiation, shrunken-to-feasibility life support systems, etc.
6. Thorough clarification of Kuiper Belt reality.
7. Does the Oort Cloud exist? (NOT proven yet.)
Good tp hear that Jeff Greason's talents are being utilized. Though we've lost touch, I always appreciated Jeff's intellect and vision.
These are awesome ideas for steampunk sci-fi! Ships whizzing around the solar system, gathering speed for a journey and doing the opposite in the destination. Relativistic weaponry firing shots that seem absolutely ridiculous but catching the enemy on its next turn around a planet. I absolutely love how that kind of space travel resembles sailing more than modern rocketry.
Testing those technologies in the solar system is very important in my opinion. The jump from chemical rockets to interstelar travel is huge. It would also be important to draw attention and funding to those projects.
One major obstacle is living on a ship for years.
@@Radrook353 We are going to have to create a new species that can survive zero Gs and high Gs but also able to have the thinking capacity of a human. Or just use robots.
And maybe actually watching the video...
It is mostly lies trying to get funding. Outside of our solar systems all their claims are simply made up. There is no way to prove any of it.
Andrew Higgins needs to write a book for the general public. This is a really fascinating topic. I'd read it and it would likely inspire many people to pursue this goal.
really? so you are applauding someone who says it aint possible and is proud that his mind is limited by science dogma?
well you guys aint scientists so it makes sense. like science fanboys.
like the guy who couldnt play in a team but is an armchair coach.
i salute your belief in the system. youtubers like this lower iq points.
unless you are researching something you dont get to say its possible...
i mean imagine a world where no one can lift over 100kg because everyone believed it to be impossible.
in that world these guys would be talking about how no human has done it.
this aint science. its a new form of religion.
before we had electricity no one would have believed it.
they are indoctrinated.
anyone can recite doctrine.you only need memory and a belief that its true.
true intelligence is discovering OR understanding a concept before its mainstream. why?
because when its mainstream you just need to memorize.
so please wake up science is just as sickening as religion was in the 90s.
covid jabs was the best example.
here is a prophecy this year its gonna be tried again in the winter.
and the jab was doctrine. funny how 60-70 percent of white people took it out of fear.
so many died. about 40 people died a week straight after that i know.....
so please stop looking for someone with all the answers.
every single human is a scientist.
the so called scientists havent cured cancer or aids.
havent found sustainable energy.
and seem to be purely rhetoric based or making viruses that accidentally escape from a lab.
so in a nutshell beat your fear of death and you see through their lies.
stay afraid and they can make you change your gender or hate foreigners.
the only time we can think like this is if we really understood everything.
we dont. especially not a greed based culture.
if you want some food for thought:
biology
chemistry
physics
?????? - there is a fourth branch of science that no one knows about.
however think about what these three study.
if you get it it should be obvious what the fourth one does.
however if you only have doctrine instead of critical thinking in you
it shall never make sense.
to those who get it... your welcome
i dont think it has a name yet but that just means its brand new.
however i strongly believe only those with a soul will see it.
good luck.
live strong
namaste
The goal of space travel is not far off. String theory states particles communicate at very far distances. That communication can be the start to jump points. Going from one particle in space to another same like partical. Then, energy conversion with quantum physics. Converting matter to energy, and back to matter. This, I am sure, would be sub quantum level reverse engineering. Then splitting atoms safely can be the power necessary to manipulate weak and strong forces. Implementing what we already know from the information available.
This was the video that ultimately urged me to pursue my dream of studying physics, now I start my journey next week. It was content like Fraser's that has kept my flame stoked through the rain. Thank you for this great interview and the months of inspiration I've received from your many videos.
You are a dream killer Fraser, but you're also a dream creator because when you put down a person that is really driven to get something to work, they will someday get it done, one way or another.
Fraser is grinch period
"Fantasy" is a better word than "dream". When people confuse fantasy with reality, they deserve to be corrected.
@@thatswhatithought6519 😆Rip.
He’s not a dream-killer at all, he enables lucid dreaming.
In all the years I’ve been watching science content on UA-cam this is by far the most exciting one ever. I was glued to this interview from start to finish and am now trying to figure out if I can get to Montreal for the symposium. Thank you so much!
Symposium sounds like a symphony of possums
A what!? Holy crap, take my money. That would be so freakin' cute! We could dress 'em up in little tuxedos and bowties and put a little cummerbund on the conductor. We're doin' it, dude. We're doin' it.
Every time I hear about using the solar winds for interstellar travel I think about that Deep Space 9 episode (Explorers, Season 3, Ep. 22). Commander Sisko built a sailing ship based off of an ancient Bajoran design and achieved warp speed. I loved that show!
Thanks for the recommendation. I watched that episode last night.
...I couldn't get over how over-the-top steampunk he made that ship. 😄 the hand crabks and manual tiller were too silly for me. If this concept pans out, the power is not going to be on the order of a small sailboat ffs.
@@jengleheimerschmitt7941 he was way over the top...I agree. He insinuated as much when he gave Jake a tour of the craft if memory serves me correctly lol...
That waa my favorite episode by far. He even used wood in its construction and the whole story was very plausible.
Zepharim Cochran would turn over in his grave!!
I must be about your age Andrew, cos I was too young for Jupiter, but I remember Saturn, and then remember thinking of the eternity that would have to pass until Uranus. That eternity did, of course, pass (in only 5 years!!). Then Neptune came around. I haven't thought of those events in the way you just made me think of them since they happened.
Thanks for that, thank you sincerely.
OMG! I know Joe Jackson! I used to work in the residential A/V feild out of a suite RIGHT NEXT DOOR to H-Bar Technologies, and actually got to tour their facility after asking him "Doesn't it require 'dammit' magnetic containment to store antimatter?", to which he responded "No, nothing nearly as extreme as you might imagine." He then showed me around and even showed me the containment vessels (two DIFFERENT types) which were only approximately the size of a large home deep freezer.
Just thouht I'd share...
This is the opposite of click bait. Thiskept appearing on my feed, I clicked on it, and really enjoyed it. I'm now going to get a lot of magnets from hard drives, a really strong motorcycle helmet and a very long snorkel and aim for Alpha C. I might need a really big mobile phone to let you all know what I find.
Awesome, let Andrew know once you've got a prototype
That’s one hell of a snorkel!
@@JeremyAndersonBoise It's a quantum snorkel that is connected to a portal that provides air from the Bahamas.
That was a fun interview. It makes me wish I were immortal to see what kind of technologies and discoveries are going to happen long after I would've died.
Don't worry, humans won't make it to be interstellar species. The proof is the universe, if it was possible, the billion, trillions of stars would have coughed up at least one civilization.
Some of the best topics and expert guests anywhere ✨🦋
I’m about a year late watching this. I’m really liking this guest. Explanations about the solar winds were easier to understand than I had previously thought. Thank you. Also I’d like to hear more about the coils that were mentioned.
Wow, what a great interview with so many great ideas!
I feel like a kid or teenager reading Carl Sagan's book "Our Universe" and finding all those great ideas in there, for propulsion for space exploration (and also the ideas about more or less balloons to explore gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn).
But now here are fresh ideas, on some orders of magnitude even better... Wow!
How could I have missed this for a year, but finally UA-cam is persistently showing me the thumbnail of this interview in the recent days..
And it's worth every minute of watching it!
I when the realities are told, it is not something to be disheartened, it is actually teaching us what cant work, making us realise we must re-think on how to do the impossible. I very much think certain things are possible but we live in an age like when we were trying to figure out powered flight. By learning what doesn't work, we learn what can work and eventually, will get there.
Dreams are there to inspire us. They don't have to be practical or realistic, they can just be fantastic dreams.
Agreed. Although, I would add that it is helpful if your dreams are consistent with the laws of the conservation of energy and the conservation of momentum.
@@A_J_Higgins I'd say it's helpful to know the difference between fiction and reality. They are very different, but both have their part to play. Staying within the realm of the possible is eminently practical. But dreaming the impossible can be fun, and provides us with mental energy. And sometimes, just sometimes, imagining the impossible may lead to breakthroughs. That being said, I also don't think anyone will break the laws you just mentioned. Some pursuits are foolhardy. Unfortunately, we don't know beforehand how fruitful an approach may be.
There is a 1 billionth scale model of the Solar System along the Melbourne foreshores with a 1.4m diameter Sun centred in St Kilda, a 12.5mm Earth 150m away and Pluto 5.8km away near Port Melbourne. When you walk the distance between 140mm Jupiter and 116mm Saturn (assuming they actually were in alignment, which they mostly aren't) you truly appreciate just how much nothing there is in space.
I missed it the first time I was there, but a 215mm Proxima Centauri is near the Sun in this scale, based on having travelled the entire circumference of the Earth to reach it.
The scale you mention of the Sun being the size of a grapefruit, the Earth would be much smaller than a peppercorn.
Yes! I live in port melbourne and over the Covid lockdown made it my goal to walk the entire solar system with my Doberman. We finally did it but we were pretty tired afterward lol….
I enjoy the channel Meatball studios here on UA-cam. One of the videos begins with a quark and goes to the end of the universe. It is all just a whole bunch of nothingness. My favorite theory for the shape of the universe is a giant 5D donut with a Big Bang in the center. If that is true then there are probably many such donuts (and other baked goods) sparsely distributed in something even bigger and mostly empty something.
@@planetdisco4821 o
If you heat that model sun to 5,778K, it would look just like the real sun from 150m.
@@DrDeuteron plus it would be great for a bbq
On many stages of human development people were convinced that this or that was impossible. And it wasn’t that they did know nothing about the world. They had science and technology on some level.
But then after some time it turned out that people discovered the whole level of rules of the world and suddenly everybody can fly - just the way our ancestors couldn’t imagine.
Today we know it’s impossible to travel to other stars or galaxies in human lifespan but who knows what we discover in the future? Maybe it becomes possible in ways we can’t even comprehend.
I believe its fundamentally different. We are watching birde fly since we are humans. Say we found out its about wings in 1500 BC in the mithos of Icarus. First flight 1903. We never seen a body doing interstellar travel except maybe astroids. And math will always be same, unless we just tear up reality(space-time) .
@@alperenozturk9235 Not at all. Yes we imagined we fly like birds which even now is impossible. But we do fly today. Just different way that our ancestors could think. The same can be with traveling between stars. Now we think about star ships and warp drives because our imagination is a projection of our world. We know that faster than light travel through space is imposible for us just like flying like a bird. But we know that the space itself can expand faster than light. We certainly do not know everything, what is possible and even less what is impossible. So I'd say maybe one day we, or what we'll become, will be able to travel between stars in ways we humans can't even imagine.
@@motomono I see where you coming from but you missed one point. We haven't seen any body doing what you have, or other hopefull thinkers describe. I believe we as humans are pretty much stuck in our near space. And we will have our minions(small or big machinery dedicated in simple operations) will scatter near star systems for information and resources.
@@alperenozturk9235 What I want to say is that we don't know what we don't know. Do you agree with that?
@@motomono of course, its why its worth to keep studying.
This was an excellent interview, thank you.
Fascinating interview, thanks Frasier! Imagine getting up to 20 - 30% without a Jupiter massed quantity of negative energy! Didn't think I was going to watch the entire thing when I started it due to the length, but once he started talking I was hooked.
My dream is to have a spacecraft moving at 30% the speed of light along with hookers and cocaine
Fantastic interview! Thanks. It's great to know we have people like Andrew Higgins right here at McGill.
1:00:48 "tread lightly". Beautifully spoken.
New topic for John: Dynamic soaring.
THANK YOU!
I see applications in particle acceleration.
I see applications in plasma control.
I see applications in 30 story building air flow processes.
I see thermodynamic applications akin to sonic refrigeration.
You have just given me months of things to think about.
I will never get any work done.
It's an absolutely mind-blowing concept. I can see why it's got your brain racing.
Unlike many commenters below who seemingly take all ideas total literally and then bash them... I really enjoyed the tossing of ideas around. I enjoy the process of speculation and thinking outside of the box.
Exactly. It doesn't hurt to brainstorm within the laws of physics as we understand them. I think some people just don't like to speculate.
Real privilege to hear this man . Surprised he had the spare time . His brains so big it’s cauterised his hair cells. Excellent vid
Dynamic Soaring Glider - mind blown!
0:01 _"I feel like I am a dream killer"_
Heck yeah! Back then I showed up on the channel, and started dreaming of visiting a place with such lush vegetation as Fraser's backgrounds, only to later learn it's just very advanced green screen CGI! ( ;-;)
lol ʕ´•ᴥ•`ʔ
I would *love* it if we went back to Neptune in my lifetime! I've loved Neptune since I was a kid - a long time ago - and even wrote a short sci-fi story about Neptune in middle school. Really enjoyed this conversation!
What's stopping you?
Oh ----you mean you want ME to send you. Don't hold your breath. Scientists have thousands of bright ideas that they yearn to have taxpayers pay for their fantasies.
This is a great conversation Fraser. Props to you for this and everything else you do!
Money spent on this endeavor will reap untold advancements in our daily lives.
Hats off to the professor who can make a difficult to understand subject understandable to those of us lucky enough to hear him speak.
Thanks to Professor Higginsber, and Fraser Cain for tuning me in.
Money spent on anything to do with space is mostly diverted to 'science educator' hires who do nothing but talk all day. It's a farce at this point. Our only hope is the private sector.
Used to work on the problem of getting just a probe to Proxima - even with ablative photonics that was a wicked problem to solve. People? Hard to see how at the moment, short of the slow route - generation ships. First, there is the time issue, even if we partially solve this using entanglement for communication, I cannot see how society can evolve in current paradigms to the flexible enough to embrace effectively time travellers. Then significant size and speed require force fields to deflect the otherwise catastrophic collision events. Getting around that with e.g. Albiquerre relies on being able to harness singularities or other exotic matter and put it relatively close to the passengers, which is many orders of magnitude harder problem than mere deflection.
This is such a great interview. Mr. Higgins is a great teacher!
😂😂😂
watching this interview a year later and dropping a reminder we are closer to our nearest star today then when this interview posted 😂🤯
So we just wait for Proxima Centauri to come to us.
Actually, all the Planets spiral away from the Sun over long periods of time like the Moon Spirals away from the Earth. This is a change in the magnitudes of each of the pair of forces since the larger orb always gains mass faster than the smaller orb of any of the orb pairs. The Sun Gains mass far faster than it looses mass converting Hydrogen to Helium, and getting rid of solar energy. The Sun spirals inward toward its Sun-Planet Barycenter, and the planets spiral away from the Sun-Planets Barycenter. The same is true of the Earth-Moon Barycenter. The Earth spirals inward toward the barycenter, while the Moon spirals away from the pair's barycenter. Currently the mass ratio is very close to 81.3 to 1.0 This number will gradually increase at an ever increasing rate. The Earth accelerates the moon to an ever higher orbit due to its increasing mass, and decelerates itself to a lower orbit. The Moon tries to do the same but looses the battle at a mass rate of 81.3 to 1.0 . The Earth wins at 81.3 / 82.3 ratio and the moon looses at a rate of 1 .0 / 82.3. The Earth spirals inward at an ever slower rate, while the Moon spirals away at an ever increasing rate. The absolute value of the distance between the two Orbs will continue to increase.
The time for the Moon to complete one orbit around the Earth tends to increase. Since 1965, they people with powerful telescopes have been bouncing laser beams off the Moon, and one of the Apollo Missions put a corner reflector on the Moon so more of the Laser light gets back to the source telescopes. The out and back time keeps increasing by milliseconds per years, so the distance keeps increasing by around 38.1 mm per year ( If I remember correctly ), questionable. The Change in the distance, divided by the distance, is proportional to the change in the mass of the system divided by the summation of the mass of the system which is also proportion to the change in the time divide by 2 times the elapsed time of the oldest and biggest orb in the system. The change in distance is one part in 9.0888 E 9, so the age of the oldest member ( Earth ) is 4544.4 million years. Two partner systems are easy to calculate, but multiple partner systems are very difficult to calculate, and any change in any of the ratios, like mass, distances, ages, external material supplies changes everything else, and the results will never be the same.
In short Chaos.
@@frasercain
We will no longer be human by that time.
lol....The Andromeda Galaxy might get here first.
@@Hysteresis11
Speak for yourself! 😅
16:50 I'm picturing a skateboarder on a half pipe "pumping" with his legs on each transition 🤘
I'm sorry if this analogy is bad
The Robert L. Forward book Rocheworld is still one of my favorites where a large laser in the Lagrange point behind Mercury and harnessing the power of the Sun - I forget the exact details - is used to power a large light sail propelling a large exploration vehicle. The sail is designed to break in segments part way through the journey with the outer sections being blown ahead of the craft where they then focus the laser from Earth back to the sail on the craft decelerating it for arrival at Barnard's Star.
One question I do have is how do we protect sensitive components and eventually people for long range high speed travel through interstellar space. GCRs are likely a real threat to astronauts at even interplanetary ranges and at relativistic speeds the thin interstellar medium becomes high energy particles constantly bombarding the spacecraft. The faster you go the worse this becomes.
I read Robert L. Forward's book "Rocheworld" as a teenager in the mid-1980s and this book is what started me on the path to the research I describe in his video. Forward's work continues to be a huge inspiration for the community researching interstellar flight.
The concern about GCRs is very real, but note that GCRs are already highly relativistic (traveling at 99% the speed of light and faster with GeV to TeV energies). So, the effect that GCRs will have on a spacecraft traveling at 20-30% the speed of light is not any worse than what our spacecraft already experience today. We have figured out how to deal with GCRs on our present day spacecraft (mainly, always have backup computers on board and on the ready, so when the main computer experiences a bit-flip, you just switch to the backup).
The other concern is the interstellar medium (the ISM) will now also be impacting the spacecraft at mega-electron-volt (MeV) energies-since the spacecraft is moving through it at a fraction of the speed of light-and this will result in gigarads of radiation exposure over the mission duration. However, these particle energies are (relative to GCRs) low and manageable. The protons and other particles of the ISM will impact and sputter away a fraction of a millimeter of the leading edge of the spacecraft, but this should be manageable with a modest amount of shielding.
There's other scify contemplating antimatter collection at Mercury.
Catching up on all the space news and stories. Loved this interview...even though most of it blasted over my head at 10% the speed of light. Thanks Fraser for another great interview
That anti matter factory would be interesting.
Would have to be built in the middle of nowhere. Kilograms of anti matter and matter going up in an accident would be quite a headache
Ahh, 13:00, Andrew said to build it in space, yes, that would be wise
Are you insane? Maybe the Moon is a better place.
@@elinoreberkley1643 Or Mars. Keep that antimatter factory far away. I ounce of antimatter released woulf yield 12 Megatons of TNT equivalent power. A kilo is 2.2046 pounds. A pound (British Imperial weights and measures) is 16 ounces. So, the mini Tsar-Bomba detonated in 1961 yield 58 megatons is 4.3 ounces. A kilo of positronium released due a magnetic vacuum bottle breach would create a mushroom cloud maybe hundreds of miles wide. A country destroying or even civilization collapsing event.
When I was around 11 or 12 years old, I had this idea of a solar wind surfer spacecraft. I imagined it riding the edge of a propagating solar wind/wave and gaining huge amounts of speed. I had read somewhere how surfers could gain speed faster riding a wave perpendicular vs parallel, and I extrapolated the idea out. I more recently learned about dynamic soaring, and the amazing speeds they are able to achieve with RC gliders. I never mentally extrapolated the same idea out to solar winds like I did with surfing. That's a wild concept!
Only just found this video. Wish I'd seen it when it was first aired. ... I've got a LOT of catching up to do - so I'm going to be up all night watching videos, crunching numbers and generally giving my grey matter a much needed hell of a work out. Thank you 🥰🥰😊😊
I just watched a video of one of the dynamic soaring gliders they spoke about, and saw speeds in excess of 500mph.
Best qualifications for getting into interstellar propulsion? Basic pyhsics and sailing!
>Scientists have discovered magnetosheath jets, fast plasma streams, in Jupiter's magnetic environment
New article in nature I saw and remembered this video, seems like there's a difference in energy that could be exploited there for the techniques mentioned in this video also mentions similar jets could be around other planets. I love the idea of Jupiter not just being the go-to planet for gravity assists but also plasma assists for either acceleration or deceleration with a plasma magnet/q-drive/e-sail, such a convenient planet lol
Let's keep looking for these potentially free sources of energy!
Even 0.2C would be phenomenal. Anything faster creates huge problems with SWERVING mechanical stresses.
Like all sails and sailors, the solar winds blow and doldrums.
We will have to add thrust on our own and find the pattern interstellar seas...
My interest in the last decade has been in nuclear power and molten salt reactors specifically. The initial interest was in slow spectrum molten salt reactors using a fluoride/lithium/beryllium salt modeled on the Oak Ridge Molten Salt Reactor Experiment which ran for four year in the 1960s.
Recent interest has shifted to fast spectrum molten salt reactors that use chloride salts which are safer, have better understood chemistry and are much cheaper. Sodium chloride is table salt.
The advantage of fast spectrum reactors is at over 1 MeV U-238 and Th-232 become weakly fissile and add to the neutron budget. These reactors will run on spent nuclear fuel and plutonium from decommissioned weapons. They can also include depleted uranium as part of the fuel cycle. All this means there are very large stockpiles of fuel for these reactors currently being stored at considerable cost as high level waste.
This could be the ample energy source needed to power an anti-matter production facility. Also molten salt reactors run much hotter than water moderated and cooled nuclear reactors making them far more practical for use in space. A cold water source is not needed to produce the thermal efficiency to draw the required amount of heat out of the reactor core. A molten salt reactor on a spaceship or a Moon base would use radiator fins for cooling.
Hook one of these up to a Hall thruster and you have a much more efficient way to accelerate at least at interplanetary distances.
Moving to HALEU at about 18% enrichment as the new standard fuel for civilian use would be a good first step and is achievable in the near term with commercial ready reactors. TRISO packaging as standard could be an added bonus for a new standard. Dramatic advantages can be obtained just by updating the standard fuel.
We need a lot more interviews like this!
Best video of the year. Thank you Fraser you have given us something to get excited about.
Well compare the evolution of space travel with nautical travel: at first we figured out how to row a boat, much later sails were added (also a drag device). With those we discovered new continents, had the VoC era, and much much later giant engines the size of houses were built to propel ships regardless of the elements
The idea he finishes describing around 29 minutes in makes me think of a non mechanical gyroscope with layers of counteropposing spinning fields creating opposing perpendicular forces. I've no clue how you could redirect one of the opposing vectors 180° to act in sync with the other one, but such a rotating field might also be part of what would allow and control steering and bouncing off the differential winds.
This was the interview that got me into following this channel a year ago
I like how Higgins smiles every time he blows your mind (and mine)! 😂
UAP smiling. [Unacknowledged Access Project]. We have been there and done that. We can take ET home.
UAP, is Quite a malleable Acronym, now wouldn't you say.
I have always dreamt about space travel myself but now that I'm approaching 60 I've finally realized that it's a pretty good idea to stay here for me. I've also been telling dreamers the sobering facts about the challenges with space travel. They weren't happy.
This video was great. I'm about to listen again. I'm not sure if you asked about the risk associated with colliding with some dust particle when traveling at insane speeds. Do we know the probability distribution for dust particles of various sizes in interstellar space? If we did we could calculate a probability distribution for arriving at the star as swiss cheese or as a cloud of atoms. Or still be alive.
Exactly. The amount of energy imparted from a tiny particle at even 5% the speed of light would obliterate the vehicle. the shielding materials needed ruins the laser based propulsion entirely.
Dont forget we know nothing about intrrstellar space. We know theres a "lot" of hydrogen out there. And scientists seem to assume it is evenly distributed. But that is unlikely due to gravity..more likely clouds of hydrogen andpossibly other things. Sp youre happily zipping along at .1 c and...your entire vessel hits a cloud of hydrogen and incinerates in a millisecond
@@cdreid9999 Yep. Be careful what you wish for. Especially if you wish to go crazy crazy fast.
@@UKnowIfUKnow Interstellar dust grains are a significant concern, as I discussed with Fraser, but this issue is not a complete show-stopper:
Interstellar dust grains are micron-sized and smaller. Alas, we cannot test these kinds of impacts (at 30% the speed of light) in the lab, but we can calculate how much energy they could explosively release on impact: At 30% the speed of light, it is about 10 J of energy. (This is just ½ mass * velocity^2, so you can check the numbers yourself.) This energy is the equivalent of a firecracker going off. It will certainly do some local damage, but the spacecraft can be designed with this in mind, including shielding and self-healing materials. Such an impact will not vaporize the spacecraft.
Now that your concerns have been addressed, how soon are you planning on leaving?
Very good Fraser.
I would very much like to continue to see your
skepticism and sharp logic.
For example, let me say about the question and
the possibility of our species and the desire
and longing for the stars:
Regarding the antimatter drive:
- In 1996 some PICOGRAM anti-hydrogen atoms
were successfully produced at CERN in Geneva
for a few NANOSECONDS.
Andrew Higgins speaks of a few kilograms
of it for a very, very long travel time.
What quantitative progress is there from 1996 to 2023?
To the sun sails:
- Tiny solar sails have hardly any capable control
mechanisms, far-reaching communication
options and complex orientation apparatuses
integrated into them.
Although some tiny life forms on Earth seem
to be able to do it with brains of 0.025 mm2.
The mayflies.
Every barrier we have encountered, or will encounter,has a will be overcome. Dream's in the past are now reality today. As will be in the future.
one of the most insightful and informative interviews I've heard in a long time. thanks
If we could achieve 2% of the speed of light in the solar system means that we could get to Pluto in 10 days!
I had to do the calculation in Wolfram alpha, before the end of the episode, so I have no idea if they address this in the video
I would take a piss on Pluto
And smoke a blunt
What assumption did you make about acceleration and deceleration time? (If you ignored it entirely, you're dramatically underestimating the time to travel short-ish distances like those within the solar system or even to reach the nearest stars.
Yes but you would just zoom past it.. you would have to accelerate half the distance then decelerate the other half. So still looking at months or years together there
I'm glad we don't have to wait for a warp drive to be invented to get a closeup look at exoplanets! I don't think I'll live to 2050 to see a probe launched to Alpha C, but my son almost certainly will and that blows my mind.
Math: nope
Wonderful chat, I think locating those solar wind pockets of turbulence in real-time will be a challenge.
I’m not sold on the interstellar mass ejection idea, there is no way to extract energy from the interstellar medium without pumping out as much enegy to collect it. You cannot add mass to your craft in the middle of your trip, if it’s mass that was already on at mission start..why was it added to begin with? The idea of catching electrons with a mag field and using it as a propellant is a far shot in the interstellar medium where there are fewer electrons.
I agree the idea of extracting energy from the interstellar medium that is blowing over the spacecraft (as viewed from the moving reference frame of the spacecraft) is difficult to accept at first glance; I had the same initial response when Jeff Greason proposed the idea (his "q-drive" concept). But after working through the analysis and equations, I confirmed it is not a perpetual motion machine. The q-drive simply concentrates the kinetic energy in the mass onboard a vehicle initially loaded with reaction mass and already in motion into a smaller mass (the payload of the vehicle without reaction mass) by expelling the reaction mass backward.
To answer your question: "why was it added to begin with?" The answer is: Because that mass had an initial velocity that was created by another propulsion device (fusion rocket, solar sail, etc.). The q-drive then concentrates this kinetic energy into the smaller mass of just the payload while expelling most of the initial mass. Again, you are concentrating the initial kinetic energy of the larger vehicle into a smaller mass (thus, making it go faster), but doing this requires interacting with another medium (the interstellar medium, in this case).
This is entirely consistent with the conservation of energy and momentum. If you want the full details, you can find Jeff Greason's paper “A Reaction Drive Powered by External Dynamic Pressure" which is linked in the video description above. This paper (and the subsequent work we have done building upon it) has gone through peer review prior to being published.
Maybe an interesting thought: I wonder if there is a way to collect mass as one performs gravitational assists and solar wind turns that would allow for increasing one's kinetic energy without, as it were, gaining velocity and thereby running out of solar system? That is, in stage 1 of your sailing trip, you intentionally slow yourself by grabbing stuff (gas, whatever) as you perform these maneuvers and then once you reach a certain level of mass, you start stage 2, stop accumulating mass, and accelerate up to some crazy speed, then in stage 3, you take advantage of the energy of your accumulated mass and extreme speeds via Q-drive ideas by shooting your accumulated mass out the back....
Great video in any case! Really enjoyed it.
What an awesome guest! He really spoke in Layman's terms so a schlep like me could understand. Great stuff. Extremely informative.
Awesome content. Thanks for the time.
Amazing talk thank you very much! So glad I subbed to this channel. Future generations are going to witness these Interstellar missions and they are in for a real treat! I'm glad the rest of us are around to see the first small steps taken!
So could we use a network of satellites orbiting Mars running plasma-magnets to give it a new artificial magnetosphere?
Very interesting discussion. Fingers crossed for a launch this century. 🤞
First, I am struck with how much I love Professor Higgins' bookshelf (but would hate to dust it as often as I would need to, were it here on this gravel road where I live, LOL!). And then I was able to pay attention to what he was saying, after I got done ogling the bookshelf. Just had to back it up to actually listen. 😄
The concepts he shared with us are quite fascinating! They could truly be used to send some kind of probes waaaay out there, and send back TONS of new information!
A like and comment for the care and feeding of the Almighty Algorithm. ❤️ ❤️
I've always been a bigger fan of "hard" sci-fi, namely the kind that focuses on fusion drives and only ever mentions warp drives as "theoretical curiosities" that we haven't ever achieved.
So this is a welcome breath of fresh air.
So tired of the "aliens" having the FTL tech and gifting it to us.
So tired of us discovering how "easy" it is to go FTL ourselves.
It trivializes the true difficulty of all things space travel, and in so doing it loses a lot of it's punch.
There's some part of me that says "NASA and the like are purpose-oriented to tackle the most technically challenging areas of engineering we have yet faced, allowing a human to exist in an environment that has never encountered a being like them".
And the rest of me goes "That's just a hair's breadth distant from being literally impossible, so why are all these sci-fi media depicting it being as easy as driving to the grocery store?"
The story shouldn't be "XYZ plot, but in space". The story should be "Space, period."
Unfortunately, nobody seems to be interested in writing that kind of sci-fi, it all seems to be in books written in the 40's to the -60's, with only a few select authors. More of it is needed IMO.
Few example plots I can think of, just because there's oh-so-many ways for your ship to betray you in the most insidious of lethal ways:
Life support systems fail on you? Better hope the whole crew's not in hibernation, or that the automated systems can wake up enough engineers to patch it together enough to get you to a safe place, else you're gonna have an encounter with The Cold Equations.
Engines malfunction? Probably not gonna have the tools or materials to fix that, if it's a nuclear engine you better cut the failed one loose, and you better also have brought a spare (you're not gonna repair the magnetic bottle on your fusion drive if it got a railgun round shot thru the containment field coils cryo plumbing, and not JUST because it's "lethal in mere seconds" radioactive). By the way, you can't just say "oh it's not radioactive because it's using D-He3 fusion which is aneutronic", because even a D-He3 reactor is only "a lot less" radioactive, not "not radioactive", you're still doing high energy atomic physics, meaning D-D fusion is gonna be happening in that reactor in side-reactions, which emits even more neutrons than D-He3 fusion. The only reason it's "Less" neutronic is because those D-D side reactions are side reactions and not the main focus, so they don't happen nearly as often. Still plenty of them to cause the reactor itself to saturate any kind of radiation detector you care to point at it, with the drive turned off for 30 days and THEN measured.
Colony run short on supplies, like needing a water pipe? Use lasers to 3-d print a stone or concrete water pipe out of local regolith, because if you use a pipe from anywhere remotely near the ship's power reactor or nuclear engines, the whole colony is gonna be fighting any number of "new and interesting" cancers.
You thought Radium Jaw was bad, what do you think happens when the very water you drink and bathe with has been turned radioactive by a wrongly-selected piece of plumbing? Oh and it's not just pipes, valves and fittings are bad news too. So is something as mundane as an O-ring. Literally any matter that has been irradiated should be banned from contact with the potable water, ventilation, sanitation, or any other system that helps support the crew. Yes, that includes the sewer pipes, because you're almost certainly going to be recycling the wastewater from those systems.
Alien contatct? Nope, no sentients, microbes at best.
Alternately, if you do think we can contact sentients, it will be them contacting us, and us stumbling on to their transmissions as noise with strangely self-consistent patterns in it. Extremely extremely faint signals, we'd need at the MINIMUM a radio telescope on the Moon's far side to even have a chance of intercepting the signals so sent. The signal we sent, intentionally, probably didn't even make it to Alpha Cent, distance wise. That's how faint things get over such large distances. If you want a truly interesting set-piece, maybe us humans figure out that a pulsar isn't quite as perfectly regular as it should be in it's timing, instead it's somehow modulated. And then thru years of analysis using the most powerful supercomputers, we figure out that there is data encoded in this modulation. More years of analysis and we can figure out what that data is, if it's even digital data (who knows, they might develop computers based on "neuron" analogue cell-type constructions rather than doped semiconductors, depends on how easy it is to purify elements without resorting to what passes for biology on their world). Point is, expect it to look like "oddly patterned noise" for 5+ generations of analysis before we figure out what it is. Also expect some new religion to pop up to worship whatever it is they think it is we found when we actually still don't have a clue.
Really really drive home the point of how so much of actual new territory being explored by science is best described as "fumbling around in the dark inside a house", but the only data you have is the theory of what a house is, namely something like "a house is composed of a series of connected rooms sharing a roofing system, with one or more floors, passage between floors being facilitated by stairs, ladders, or elevators". And we don't know what rooms, roofs, floors, passages, stairs, ladders, or elevators are yet either.
Basically sometimes science is just flailing around in the dark and noting down what you bump into or knock over, and if you knock something over noting what noise it made when it fell.
I absolutely love Andrew Higgins' enthusiasm!
Agreed!
What isn't possible today becomes possible tomorrow. Not every idea comes to fruition, but when our understanding gets an update, problems can crumble away.
Makes you wonder if there will be a point in the future where it no longer remains true.
The greatest specific impulse I can currently conceive of without having to go into things like antimatter:
Strap a powerful ion drive, to a thin film radio active solar sail, lined on the side facing away from the sun with a composite material wired to harvest electrical energy from the radio active decay to feed the ion thruster. Or several lightweight but powerful ion thrusters such as the EAPS.
A thin film solar panel solar sail will also be pretty good, but the radio active one is better. Heck. Maybe it would be possible to make a thin film radio active solar panel material that also harvest the radioactive decay similar to the first scheme.
Those are all good ideas, and they have all been examined in some detail. Related to your thinking, the idea of using a radioactive sail that gets thrust from the fragments (alpha particles) it shoots out has also been explored.
While all these ideas would work, they are all still rockets (ion thrusters, radioisotope sails, etc.) that obey the rocket equation, and as such, are not going to get to above about 1% the speed of light. Their exhaust velocities are limited (3-4% of c) and using a radioactive source results in carrying a lot of dead mass (because not all the fissile material ends up being used). If you are willing to wait 500 years for your probe to get to the nearest stars, these technologies will work.
But if you want to get data back from a mission within the lifetime of the people who launched it, we are going to need to develop technologies that permit us to go faster.
@@A_J_Higgins Yeah. I was just talking big ISP. I'm mostly interested in colonizing our own solar system. Practical interstellar travel will happen when it happens.
Alexander valdimer kowaliuk here, lets do it.❤
Great Interview! I've always been a fan for the solar wind ;-) and for a second age of sail, looking forward to it, Thank you Fraser and Andrew.
Absolutely riveting segment, Fraser. Andrew is quite a visionary. Gives me hope.
As always, thanks much for sharing.
Steve
I know this video is old, but this has to be said. Our species needs more people like you and the scientists you interview. As a civilization we need to rekindle our interests in exploring beyond the walls we have set for ourselves else we will stagnate. You and others have settled into the roles that the giants of Bill Nye and Carl Sagan have done before you, and I hope that you do for others what they have done for me. For us to succeed as a species we need to turn our gaze starwards as any alternative will never be as bright.
As an engineer, interstellar travel is a math problem begging for a solution. We’ll figure out greater than light speed travel at some point.
How might the intersecting solar winds at Alpha Centauri (3 stars interacting) allow a greater ability to generate dynamic lift than our single sun allows? Has this been considered? I'm picturing 3 soap bubbles connected together vs. our single soap bubble.
Definitely worth thinking about!
Love these interviews! So informative and captivating. Thanks to both of you 🙏😃
Side note: I just watched that video of a glider using dynamic soaring, and it is freaking impressive... and a little bit scary. The whole time I'm like, "How is this thing not ripping itself apart?" because it's going so fast. I'd hate to be one of the spectators if that thing ever went out of control.
ua-cam.com/video/4eFD_Wj6dhk/v-deo.html
A quick calculation says it's pulling around 50 G's!!! The design and construction of such a glider is very exotic engineering because of the staggering G-loads and need to provide useable lift/drag at 550 MPH. The aerodynamics seems nearly nutty. Everything must highly specialized. It's not a balsa wood thing you can buy at a hobby shop!
@@danbaker7191 The wings are made of a laminated sandwich of carbon composites to exacting standards. I build various types of RC plane parts and even I would have difficulty building a dynamic soaring wing, even with the correct equipment. Lightweight strength isn't so much the issue; it's building in the appropriate warping tolerances, so as not to effect the wing's performance too much.
@@skateboardingjesus4006 All true but a couple points. 1. Carbon Fiber is really, really good for such applications. 2. This thing is small and light. It's a lot easier to build something to withstand 50 Gs that weighs 1kg than it is to design one that weighs 200kg.
@@wingracer1614 Of course, increase the weight and you increase the inertia and dynamic loads on the wing.
I really loved this conversation! Need to listen again! So inspiring!
I wish people would stop talking about Proxima Centauri as an example of a possible Earth 2.0. Proxima Centauri is, like the vast majority of these so-called "habitable zone" exoplanets, a red dward system where the exoplanets are spinning very close and rapidly around the star and so are probably tidally locked and being blasted by the numerous solar flares typical of red dwarves. In other words, a not so habitable exoplanetary system.
The big problem is that right now, our main method of detecting exoplanets, the transit method, is heavily skewed towards finding planets with a very short periodicity around their stars, which means that they are located very close to their stars and have periods of several Earth days or weeks. This means that only those around red dwarves, with their low light output, would be in a habitable zone at these close orbits. This means that these red dwarf habitable zone planets will be tidally locked and will be blasted constantly by the solar flares of these red dwarves.
The other two stars of the Alpha Centauri triple star system are a type G and type K star - and neither have exoplanets that we have so far detected, which does not mean that they do not have exoplanets, just that the piss poor transit method that we have is not able to detect them. The theories of star formation that we have would indicated that almost certainly, many other solid bodies would coalesce around a forming young star. If the plane of the planetary system does not cross the star in the same plane as our line of sight to that star, we will simply not be able to see these exoplanets using the transit method.
The sun is a type G star, and I would be more excited if the Alpha Centauri A type G star was found to have exoplanets in the habitable zone.
This topic always gets my attention, thank you. Listening now!
At around 18:00 he's talking about dynamic gliding, and I think that's done in the book 7 Eves.
35:19. The ship's cargo should be at the back in a bay area as in a cargo bay door emergency air pressure release. 💭
I just imagine Andrew Higgins as a Teacher! - Teaching as Many Eager Minds as humanly possible!!
The closest known black hole is either V Puppis (960 ly) or HR 6819 (1,000 ly). I proposel that we build an O'Neill Cylinder with an anti-matter drive to go there. This is a generation starship that use the black hole to slow it done and enter orbit about the black hole. We talking a journey of about 5,000-10,000 years or more at 20% of c. The mission to start a base to build Halo Drive starships as proposed by Kipper, "Fuel-free Relativistic Propulsion of Large Masses via Recycled Boomerang Photons". This will open select parts of the galaxy, hopping from black hole to black hole. The bad news, to get back to Earth is HARD - maybe we could launch a Halo Drive starship with just enough moment to reach Earth and Bussard ramjet for breaking. Starting with 10,000 people in the first O'Neill starship, they will have descendants throughout the galaxy that will far out number the population of the Solar System in about 50,000 short years or so. STRONG DREAM REIGN HERE.
That dynamic soaring thing is super impressive. There is a video of it on UA-cam.
Wow, this was fascinating! Thanks so much, you two
Just got around to watching this. Fascinating stuff thanks Frasier!
Glad you enjoyed it!
@@frasercain what a gent.. the video is a year old, you have nearly 1/2 a million subscribers and you're still replying to comments.
Legend..
Here are the distances to each of the mentioned star systems:
1. **TRAPPIST-1:** TRAPPIST-1 is located approximately 39.5 light-years away from Earth.
2. **Proxima Centauri:** Proxima Centauri is the closest known star to the Sun, located approximately 4.24 light-years away from Earth.
3. **Kepler-186:** Kepler-186 is located approximately 582 light-years away from Earth.
4. **Kepler-62:** Kepler-62 is located approximately 1,200 light-years away from Earth.
5. **LHS 1140:** LHS 1140 is located approximately 40 light-years away from Earth.
6. **Tau Ceti:** Tau Ceti is located approximately 11.9 light-years away from Earth.
These distances are approximate and may vary slightly depending on the method used to determine stellar distances and any updates in astronomical measurements.
Professor Higgins (OMG, that brings to mind "My Fair Lady") is full of extraordinary ideas! Great interview, Frazer!